About a month ago, I prepared a fresh blog post about the latest frenzy in mobile video called Vine (@VineApp). I began using Vine early on and thought about all the ways one could utilize it for business and how YouTube had better watch out. Little did I know that Instagram was about to release their own video tool built directly into their already monumentally popular photo-sharing service.

Boy, did I feel behind the wagon on that one. { forehead smack }

So I asked Zina, who manages our company blog, to pull my article. I didn’t want to see any snarky “We landed on the moon!” comments coming back at me on Twitter or LinkedIn for being “behind the times” on this issue.

Some days it’s hard to keep up when so much can change in an Internet minute. But now that we’ve moved ahead a few months into the reality of the situation in the video-sharing world . . .

Instagram — already owning a massive piece of the mobile photo-sharing market — completely leveled the playing field on June 20, 2013, as you can see from this graph displaying link shares (orange = links to Instagram.com; blue = links to Vine.com).

I’ll admit that I, too, have since gone back to Instagram and don’t use Vine all that much anymore — primarily because Instagram’s audience is larger, and it has more options. However, in an effort to maintain a dynamic website, many businesses are still using both vehicles to:

Promote new products

Give consumers a behind-the-scenes look at their operations

Foster community and crowdsourcing engagement

…and more

The following infographic from TechCrunch.com displays a nice list of features from both Instagram and Vine, as well as what could be coming down the line from these two media-sharing giants. Check it out:

Even though I’ve been forced to revisit the topic of Instagram vs. Vine, I’m still of the mindset that YouTube had better watch out. The ease of use of both of these video-sharing channels makes it infinitely simpler and faster to share content.

Have you been using Vine or Instagram for your business? What do you think about the new and improved Instagram as it compares to Vine? Where do you see these apps heading in the future?